McCain Ad: Obama as the Antichrist?

By Mary Lu Carnevale

Steven Waldman is president and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, and author of Founding Faith. Previously the national editor of U.S. News & World Report, he is a recognized expert on religion, social issues and politics. Click here for Waldman’s full bio.

Much attention has been given to John McCain’s “celebrity” ad showing Barack Obama alongside paragons of ditziness Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. But some are arguing that it’s a second ad that will go down in the record books as an all time low – in part because it stokes fears that Sen. Obama is, literally, the antichrist.

Called “The One,” the Web ad implies that Sen. Obama has a Messiah complex. It begins with an announcer intoning, “And: It should be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him: The One.”

The ad shifts to snippets from Obama speeches – “A nation healed! A world repaired! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” And the announcer declares: “And he has anointed himself ready to carry the burden of The One. To quote Barack, ‘I have become a symbol of America returning to our best traditions.’” It shows a movie clip of Moses (Charlton Heston) parting the Red Sea, with an Obama presidential seal rising from the waves. The announcer intones: “and the world shall receive his blessings.”

McCain supporters argue that it’s a playful ad that pokes fun at Sen. Obama’s sense of grandiosity. But liberal religious leaders see something ominous. The ads “seem to target Evangelical Christians in profoundly disturbing ways, using language and imagery that would have a special effect on Evangelicals… inspiring anxiety of the most primal spiritual form: fear of the Anti-christ,” wrote Brian McLaren, a leading progressive evangelical.

That’s a strong charge. After all, the antichrist is a profoundly evil character of the New Testament: generally thought to be a human, possessed by the devil or demonic spirit, he would be hailed as a savior by the masses and then rule the earth in ignominy, just prior to Jesus’ return.

Let’s look at the evidence about the McCain ad.

The first thing to understand is that the “question” of whether Sen. Obama is the antichrist has been widely discussed in certain Christian circles, beginning long before the ad was launched.

Hal Lindsey, author of the bestselling “The Late Great Planet Earth,” compared Sen. Obama’s positive reception overseas to what the antichrist can expect. “He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for,” Mr. Lindsey wrote on the popular conservative Web site wnd.com.
“And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin. The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance,” he wrote.

The conservative Web site RedState.com sells T-shirts with horns popping out of an O and the label, “The Anti-Christ,” and a bumper sticker pairing Sen. Obama with the antichrist in the Left Behind series, Nicholas Carpathia.

For those wanting to review the signs of Sen. Obama’s demonic tendencies, the Web site barackobmaantichrist.blogspot.com details the evidence. On Yahoo Answers!, a reader posts the question, “Is Barack Obama the anti-Christ?” Another responded, in moderate tones, “I am not 100% convinced it is him, but I think it is very likely.”

Most important, emails have been making the rounds in Christian circles for months. A typical one:
“According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40′s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything.”

So that’s the environment into which the McCain ad was launched. Was the ad designed to fuel this sentiment?

At a minimum, it clearly intended to show that Sen. Obama himself has a Messianic complex, a notion that has become a standard refrain in the conservative commentariat. Sen. McCain’s campaign manager refers now to Sen. Obama as “The One.” Rush Limbaugh calls him Lord Obama. Jonah Goldberg asks on the National Review Online whether Sen. Obama is the “Messiah in our Midst?”

They have partly based these barbs on the rapturous reception that Sen. Obama has received from some of his supporters. That’s fair game. Some have offered giddy praise inviting parody. (Oprah comes to mind.)

The McCain campaign’s ad, however, went much further, taking Sen. Obama’s words grotesquely out of context.

For instance, the ad claimed that Sen. Obama said, “I have become a symbol of American returning to our best traditions.” This line supposedly came from a private meeting with Democrats, but witnesses have subsequently said that Sen. Obama’s actual words were: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

There apparently was no transcript so neither side can prove it. But, significantly, this latter version fits what Sen. Obama has said repeatedly. After getting a rousing welcome from students in Virginia, he said, “This crowd is not about me. It’s about you. I’ve been a receptacle for your hopes and dreams.”

Early in his campaign, he commented on how so many people had flocked to his campaign. “I do think that I’ve become a receptacle for a lot of other people’s issues that they need to work out.” He’s repeatedly described himself as a “flawed vessel” and said that the race “wasn’t about me.”

Suggesting that a candidate thinks he’s God is a rather strong charge but some religious leaders argue that the McCain ad went even farther. The Eleison Group, a Democratic consultant operation specializing in reaching religious voters, published a detailed memo attempting show how the McCain ad uses language and imagery that seems suspiciously similar to that from the Left Behind series, which has sold 70 million copies.

Their evidence:
• The Ad refers to Obama as The One. Left Behind refers to the false religion set up by antichrist Nicholas Carpathia as The One World Religion.
• The ad quotes Obama as saying, “A nation healed, a world repaired…we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.” In the Left Behind Series, the slogan of the One World Religion is, “We are God.”
• The ad features a stairway to heaven, and an image of a sun-drenched cloudscape that looks a bit like the covers of two recent Left Behind books.

Liberal Christian scholar Randall Ballmer concludes: “There’s there is no doubt that the ad plays effectively on evangelical fears of the Antichrist and a ‘one-world government.’”

The comparisons with Left Behind, and the general buzz about whether Sen. Obama is the antichrist prompted the authors of the Left Behind series to weigh in. “I can see by the language [Sen. Obama] uses why people think he could be the antichrist,” wrote Tim LaHaye, “but from my reading of scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria,” adding that “perhaps this is overblown.”

Significantly, though, co-author Jenkins told Beliefnet that questions from concerned Christians to him about whether Sen. Obama is the antichrist have tripled in the last two weeks, during the period when the ad started running. In that sense, whether the ad was designed to stoke fears of Sen. Obama as the antichrist or not, it has had that effect.

So, the upshot: I’m not totally persuaded that the language and imagery in the ad was designed to specifically play off the Left Behind books. The bright yellow clouds seem vaguely similar to a Left Behind cover but mostly they just seem like the sort of standard clip-art one would use to evoke a deity.

However, I do believe it’s likely that the McCain camp knew that an ad mocking Sen. Obama for having a Messianic complex would have explosive meaning and that they were aware of how much traction the Obama-as-antichrist idea had in some Christian circles. Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan reportedthat the ad was created by media guru Fred Davis, who, she says, is “a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed.”

My guess is that the McCain camp viewed the ad as a three-fer: some viewers would view it as a playful poke at Sen. Obama’s ego, showing Sen. McCain to have a sense of humor and Sen. Obama to be too full of himself. Other, more religious voters, would be downright offended by Obama’s Messianic complex, since, antichrist aside, it’s offensive for anyone to think he’s God-like. And still other voters would view it as validation or reinforcement of the messages they’ve heard elsewhere that Obama is the antichrist.

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